ebb and flow
by sea-salt kisses
Summary: There was always something different about the way he was drawn to the water. — Demyx. AU.


**ebb and flow.  
><strong>character: demyx**  
><strong>song: _what the water gave me __— _**florence and the machine  
>. . .<strong>

There was always something different about the way he was drawn to the water. Demyx realized it first when he was six and he wakes up with the tinge of sea-salt laced in his nostrils and a heaving in his belly. He barely makes it to the basin before his fingers clench white around it, last night's chicken parm erupting against the porcelain and his mother's trilling voice echoing softly behind him.

"Demyx? Darling, are you alright?"

The boy lays his cheek flat against the seat of the toilet, little chest rising and falling gingerly until his stomach settles down. He swallows hard against the taste of vomit and bile in his mouth. He breathes through trembling lips so that the smell of brine doesn't permeate his senses any more than necessary.

Through clenching teeth he lies; thin, chapped lips curling into a smile.

"I'm okay, Momma. My tummy just hurts, that's all."

**. . .**

In middle school, he's known as the hemp-loving surfer hippie that spends his days polishing surf boards and staring vacantly, almost lusting, at the swells.

It's more than a habit. When asked, his mother giggles and laughs nervously and comments that her boy is the committing-type; that one day, the right girl will find the trait endearing. The inquirers laugh too, uneasily, and gaze out towards the bayline, watching with the same apprehensive baited breath as Demyx weaves in and out of cold, gray water atop his slicing longboard. The waves part like the Red Sea beneath his capable turns and zips. When the tide ebbs out and the waves simmer to a glassy state of dormancy, the boy lays back on his board and traces patterns atop the water's black surface. In time, the days grow cold, the water icing in parts, but still Demyx floats around on his board until his mother pleads his father fetch him back in. It is this that raises the speculation that he's a stoner; the smoke that rises around him, the fog of his own breath in the chill. On the bleak, North Atlantic seaboard, his mother occupies herself with mechanically sorting laundry as his father calls angrily into the night, chanting Demyx's name until the boy's trance breaks and he makes it back to shore.

His father raises a hand to the boy. His mother titters anxiously and lays warm, trembling fingers against his forehead.

"Demyx, you'll catch your death, darling." His mother is beautiful when she's like this; broken and fragile like a hooked fish. Demyx grins around chattering teeth, ignoring the sting his father's slap left on benumbed cheeks, and presses a soft hand to his mother's throat.

Even still, the next day he's out again. The water's cooled by this time to a near death chill. No one in the town of Maviny dares venture within fifty yards of the rocky shoreline.

Two hours in, there is a commotion out the window that has his mother screeching his name and tripping over the rotting floorboards of their deck, running through eelgrass and picket fence to reach the breakers. It's the boy next door, a small, capable thing with cropped black hair and squinted eyes that dares brave the icy water to fetch him and bring him in.

Doctors judge the bite to be the work of a small _Carcharodon carcharias_. The boy was well past the third sandbar when he was attacked, managing to gouge out an eye and fend the beast off, but not before he would require 135 stitches to look whole again. He lost no fingers, and no toes, but the scarring is unlikely to heal.

His family packs up their belongings and leaves Maviny the next week, trading the eastern seaboard for a quaint little town in the foothills of New York, where the subject of the ocean becomes a taboo. Demyx spends his evenings after supper staring out into the darkness; feeling nothing.

**. . .**

It is here he meets Axel.

The boy is nothing like Demyx. He's flippant and dark, eyes green like absinthe and cutting, body a curving scythe of sinful pleasure that Demyx can't quite keep away from. His hair is red like a sea fan, not that Demyx has seen any past the scanned National Geographic photographs he keeps in a shoebox beneath his bed, and his lips curve like the wings of eagle rays. His skin is an expanse of hard white flesh, like the belly of the shark he remembers so vividly in his dreams. His eyes, those cruel, absinthe eyes, widen as they take in Demyx's scar, the crescent that traces from the middle of his ribcage to the arch of his hipbone. The dirty blonde shivers when Axel brushes the tips of his fingers over a mark, lips like wings pulling into a predatory smile.

When they fuck for the first time, all Demyx can see is the rise of ocean waves, swelling as he rides Axel's cock, the scent of salt pungent on their skin. He feels something rising in his veins, a thick, clotted darkness, and it's all so painfully wrong. But still he moans in pleasure, their voices rising like the tide—

When it's over, Axel doesn't touch him. He stands, puts on his clothing slowly, deliberately, and there isn't a kiss goodbye.

Demyx watches him go soundlessly, thin lips pulling taut. In the end, his legs throw over the side of the bed, long and callused fingers reaching for the familiar box behind old tennis rackets and his abandoned guitar case.

He falls asleep with pictures of deep sea vents and sponges taller than the Empire State building clutched in both hands, and doesn't find the energy to mourn them when he wakes up the next morning to find them in pieces along his sheets.

**. . .**

Their senior year of high school, Demyx really does become the hemp-loving hippie the kids of yesterday dreamed he would.

He and Axel and Axel's crazy friends hotbox and roll, pot smoke clotted thick like curdled milk as they slam down I-84 in Axel's fucked up Jeep with the five-grand speaker system, voices raised to the heavens as they keen the forgotten love-ballads of Zeppelin and the Stones. It's winter and hoarfrost becomes the new pink, coating the scarfs and toques of Yankees for miles.

It's perfect, because he finally finds something to distract him from the emptiness he feels at home. His father found his stash last month, took one look and burned it all _—_ every last picture and diagram to remind him of what he had lost. Without the ocean, he finds his happiness in Axel, in the way the boy can be so utterly unattached and still fuck like he's born for it. Demyx finds it hard to hyperventilate with Axel's cock in his mouth, so he swallows hard and tries his best to pretend it means something.

Before Christmas break, there's talk of a new kid, a half-pint missing the other portion of his whole. A midget with blonde hair and eyes wide as baseballs, blue as the Caribbean sea. His twin died up in Ottowa, and the kids say it was a rogue polar bear that mauled him, fucked up the kid's pretty face and left bits and chunks of scalp covered in brunette hair behind. What really happened was an overdose; at least, that's what Demyx finds from Vanitas when the kid grouses about how hard the blonde punches, and _it was just a fucking joke_.

Axel meets the blonde in his advanced Chem class. He promptly finds Van two classes later and fucks up the kid's face a bit more than the blonde managed to.

The blonde named _Roxas_.

**. . .**

Larxene, being Larxene, is the first to illuminate Axel's new-found addiction.

"All it took was one look from pretty boy and Ax fell hard," she speaks in a harsh peal of laughter, blue-green eyes narrowed over a saccharine-tinged smile that ripples with electric malice.

Axel, to his credit, doesn't do anything apart from look up from the joint he's smoking. Eyes like aphrodisiac narrow, and he expels a cloud of acrid odor in her face from between pursed lips. Larxene hardly flinches. "Get laid, Larx," he's quick to admonish, eyes flickering from her face to Demyx's. The contact doesn't last long, and Demyx is dreaming of sea turtles, swimming idly in the pools of Axel's gaze. The redhead looks down as if scalded.

"Wonder if Roxas is available," she muses, and the eyes so unfocused and dilated flicker to hers in a silent warning that has even her frozen.

Axel's expression is beyond murderous _—_ _holocaustal_.

But then he's grinning and laughing in that quiet way he does, rising to shove Larxene in the face and ruffle Demyx's hair. "Fuck off. _Pretty boy _is too busy flirting with Naminé to have any interest in you."

The aforementioned Naminé glances up from where she's snuggled tight to Marluxia's chest, pretty blue eyes not unlike Roxas's narrowing hard. The boy whose blond roots peek out vaguely from beneath a mass of pastel pink hair flips Axel off, lazily. Demyx can't seem to find the words to say, but when Axel looks back at him with a smile and offers him the joint, he takes it.

The redhead doesn't seem to notice the way his hands shake when Demyx does.

**. . .**

Roxas is soft, the boy a tangled mess of emotions. He's delicate, eyes so painfully large and innocent, framed with long black lashes and beautiful golden hair; bestowed with the kind of face that belongs to a fairy prince. Demyx likes the way his blonde spikes curl upward towards the sun, even in the face of wind and rain and snow. It's like he's destined to forever reach from the clutches of bleak darkness, inclining toward the light. He can almost see why Axel spends all his spare time stalking the kid. He's like Demyx's mother; beautiful and dangerously frail. It doesn't stop him from packing a razor-edged tongue and fists that don't hesitate to fly out, especially at the mention of his dead brother. _Sora._

They spend time together on occasion, mainly where Axel is involved. Axel and Demyx aren't together – never have been – but Demyx never fails to feel cheated when Roxas is around. He's like a puppet master, with everything he does leading Axel further and further astray, tangling him further and further into the strings. Demyx finds himself falling deeper and deeper into the dreams again. The dreams of the water and the sky and drowning, drowning, drowning, deep in cold black water.

"Have you ever wanted something so much, you'd be willing to give your entire soul and mind to keep it?" the boy asks him one day, when the two of them wait for Axel to come back from the movie theatre bathroom. They're sitting in the lobby, Roxas holding a 7-Eleven slush he snuck in through the back (Xion works here, and all he had to do was smile and bat those baby blues and she let him in with a flush and a stammer), tongue wrapped around the red and blue striped straw. Demyx munches Milk Duds from a sweating yellow carton, a humid miasma of chocolate air hanging about him.

The elder thinks vaguely of ocean water crushing him and holding him under, but doesn't speak immediately. Instead, he looks over at the boy and realizes immediately just what he's up against.

Roxas's eyes are locked hard with Demyx. The musician swallows and looks away.

"I'll steal him from you, you know."

He knows.

Before Demyx can sum up a response, Axel arrives. He sees the two pairs of eyes averted, and Demyx wants to scream when the redhead's hand touches Roxas's shoulder and his eyes immediately flicker to the head of gentle blonde spikes. "You two okay? You're totally spacing."

Roxas looks up and smiles sweetly, Demyx not missing how Axel's hand tightens and his body pulls back as if caught in the act of something improper. The boy raises a hand to touch the elder's. "Nothing. Dem was telling me how much he likes popcorn. Why don't you buy us some?"

Axel grins wide. He does.

And Demyx doesn't think about what happens between them when Axel drops him off at his house three hours later.

**. . .**

Roxas holds true to his word. There is no fight with fire and brimstone and the clashing of blades. There are no words tossed between parties under the influence of liquor or street drugs.

Roxas takes Axel and Demyx just leaves. Jumps into his car and drives away. He sings for hours at a street corner, collecting twenty dollars in tips, and gives a blow job to some guy who looks fourty-five in a Valero parking lot for thirty-two bucks in gas money.

He makes it within three miles of his former home before the fumes his car has been rolling on for the past fifteen minutes give out. He runs the rest of the way, throat clenched in an everlasting lump and the light of the moon beating down on him. There is nothing to keep him away now; nothing to stop him from being where he's always wanted. There's no Axel to keep up the lying front. There's no Roxas to keep him grounded. He runs and runs until his lungs are lined with the salt-air. The breakers loom fifty feet away in the moonlight, and Demyx collapses on the sand, rocks pressing hard into his palm and sea-glass cutting slices through the rough skin of his knees. Crabs the colour of sedimentary rock scuttle by, Demyx avoiding their claws and scrambling to his feet.

The waves brush the shore like a lover's embrace. _Like Axel's fingers when he and Roxas make love —_ not mindless fucking like what it was he and Demyx had, but real, genuine love, the kind of love his mother dreamed about him having. Heart-wrenching, back-breaking love. Demyx steps forward into the water.

He was never much of a singer, but it doesn't stop him now. He sings the lullaby his mother used to sing him when he was six and the smell of the sea sickened him. He sings it high and broken, paying no mind to the currents threatening to rip him off his feet, the rip-tide he knows is out this time of night. He hasn't seen the ocean in five years and it's all he can do to keep himself from breaking down completely.

Completion, at last. To all a happy ending.

He's still singing when the waves slip over his head.

When the water fills his lungs and he sinks deep, deep down into the abyss, he knows where he truly, finally belongs.

**. . .  
><strong>_but oh my love don't forsake me,  
><em>_i let the water take me—_

_(_**(AN: If you take the time to fave, please take the time to review. A word or two makes all the difference, and it makes me write stories like this more often.))**


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